The Path and Control

The Path draws on the video game’s unique element of control to engage the player and to emphasize moods and points. One of the first things that struck me about the game was the fact that, in order to interact with objects, you must release your controls. In Grandmother’s house, your path is preset—you can barely move your field of vision. The walking gives the player a feeling of control, but the speed becomes so painfully slow that the movement is inhibiting. The running gives you back that sense of free will (though in select areas you can only walk), but snatches it back as the view zooms out and up so that foliage blocks your sight and makes you feel more lost and helpless. The fact that control of the character is so limited highlights the inevitability of helplessness and pain and death in life. Feeling the urge to make the character run faster or interact with something, but knowing that you cannot make it happen—that it’s all up to the game—breeds a feeling of resignation that parallels the girls’ acceptance of their wolves. The fact that they give up control, that they essentially walk to their deaths willingly, speaks either to our ignorance through life or our realization that all paths end in death, perhaps even both (or none…I could certainly be way off the mark—yet only more evidence of my own inevitably-human lack of complete control/omniscience). Maybe this game even motions toward the vice in complacency, as the lacks of players’ ability to control happens nearest to the death scenes and following the controlling instructions to stay on the path make for an incomplete, boring playing experience.